The constituent status and “the vital national interest”

Under the BiH Constitution, in the political decision-making processes and procedures related to the enactment of laws, the constituent peoples are entitled to invoke the vital national interest and, thereby, to initiate separate proceedings for the resolution of such disputes. Thus, pursuant to Article IV.3

(e) of the BiH Constitution, a majority of any ethnic group within the House of Peoples may block the enactment of a law by Parliament if the relevant ethnic group declares that the given law is destructive to its vital national interest. Such a deadlock, if possible, should be resolved through the participation of the House of Peoples and, possibly, by convening a Joint Commission and, in the end, by submitting an application to the Constitutional Court. In addition, pursuant to Article V.2(d), a dissenting Member of the Presidency may declare a Presidency Decision to be destructive of a vital interest of the Entity from the territory from which he was elected.²³² Next, the decision shall be put forward to the National Assembly of the Republika Srpska or to the Bosniak or Croat Delegates to the FBiH House of Peoples for further examination. The challenged decision may be declared ineffective by a two-thirds majority vote in each of these bodies.

The BiH Constitution does not contain a catalogue of the vital national interests or a definition of the notion “vital national interest”. Nevertheless, the BiH Constitutional Court does not hold that the vital national interest of the constituent peoples is a notion with no substance but that it is protective of certain principles without which a society “with differences protected under its respective constitution” could not “function efficiently”. Accordingly, the idea of “constituent status” has a direct effect on the answer to the question of what a vital national interest of one people may imply.²³³